Report says violence cost Mexico 18% of GDP last year

Members of a search group carry the coffin of Pedro Huesca as they walk to a cemetery in Veracruz, Mexico, on March 8. Huesca, a police detective, disappeared in 2013 and was found in a mass grave. His remains were among more than 250 skulls found over the past several months in what appears to be a drug cartel mass burial ground on the outskirts of the city of Veracruz, prosecutors said. (Felix Marquez/AP)

EFE

Violence cost Mexico the equivalent of 18 percent of the gross domestic product in 2016, a year when the homicide rate rose, the 2017 Mexico Peace Index report said Tuesday.

The cost of the violence amounted to 25,000 pesos ($1,335) per person last year, Mexican Institute for the Economy and Peace coordinator Patricia de Obeso told EFE.

The violence is “a tax on the country’s security” that all citizens pay and that comes to more than a month of pay for the average Mexican worker, De Obeso said.

The cost is even higher in states like Colima, where it came to 66,500 pesos ($3,555) and Guerrero, where it totaled 53,600 pesos ($2,865) per capita, the researcher said.

The report’s authors factored direct costs, such as government spending on the armed forces and business spending on security, and indirect costs, including the effect of crime on public perceptions and the loss of a breadwinner for a family.

Society must decide “if the investment we’ve made in the past 10 years in directly fighting drug trafficking … in containing violence, has really had an impact” or whether citizens must ask themselves “what we should be investing in to improve the level of peace,” De Obeso said.